My new novel. It starts with the award-winning, BBC broadcast prologue, "The Orphan and the Mob", and continues with Jude's quest for True Love in Tipperary, Galway, the Aran Islands, and Dublin... Love, death, arson, philosophy, and sex. Starring Jude, an orphan who looks the spit of Leonardo DiCaprio. Except for having two penises. Which makes True Love... complicated.
NEWS AUGUST 2008
I'll be reading (and singing) in Charlie Byrne's bookshop (in Galway) on Tuesday August 5th 2008, at 6pm or so. Vinny asked me to do something in Charlie's while I'm in Galway, and you don't say no to Vinny.
I reckon I'll read from the Galway section of Jude: Level 1, chat a bit, read a few poems, and then sing two or three Toasted Heretic
songs, with Declan Collins fingering an acoustic guitar in a manner so
sensuous that three-quarters of the women and a quarter of the men in
the audience will be distracted entirely from the songs by the thought
"If he can do that to a guitar, what could he do to my... wow..."
NEWS May 20th 2008
I'm going to be reading at Listowel Writers' Week, on Friday 30th of May (2008), at 2pm, in the Arms Hotel. It's a programme packed with some pretty heavy Irish names - Seamus Heaney, Anne Enright, John Banville, and my favourite Irish economist, David McWilliams - as well as the occasional top-quality foreigner, such as Lloyd Jones (author of Mister Pip).
There's also some good films showing in their Film Club. May I most heartily recommend Todd Haynes' astonishing, poetic, jittery, thrilling dream life of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There. In particular, Cate Blanchett's performance is as good as acting can get. It is more alive and true than most of our own lived moments. See it.
Listowel rocks.
NEWS May 19th 2008
Jude: Level 1 is being published next week by Topos Books of Athens, in a translation by George Betsos. George and I have exchanged many profound, cultured and erudite emails over the past year, as we tried to work out the best way to translate "Ardcrony ballocks" into Greek, so I know that he has done as fine and conscientious a job as could be humanly achieved. (And what a fecker of a book to translate, the man is a hero.)
More on that here...
NEWS May 1st 2008
Well, it seems I have been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, alongside Alan Bennett (he wrote The Madness of King George!), Will Self (he wrote Great Apes!), Garrison Keillor (he wrote Lake Wobegon Days!), John Walsh (he once wrote in the Independent that I looked like a member of the Proclaimers!), and Joe Dunthorne (he wrote the extremely acclaimed first novel Submarine, and is only eight years old!)
Much more on that here...
NEWS April 2008
Holy guacamole, I totally forgot to mention that I'm reading in Prague later today, and again tomorrow. (Monday 7th of April 2008, and Tuesday 8th of same...) I should have had this up as a news thing weeks ago. Months ago.
Anyway, if you've any English-speaking friends in Prague, tell them it'll be funny, intellectually titillating, and I may get my kit off if enough people throw their underwear at me.
I note with gloom that the Prague Daily Monitor has listed it as a poetry reading, so there goes my casual walk-in audience. (Just to clarify: It won't be a poetry reading. 100% uncut, hardcore prose, all the way.)
I'm planning to read "The Orphan and the Mob" tonight, that's Monday night, in the Globe bookshop (as part of Alchemy Prague)...
...and "The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble" on Tuesday night in Shakespeare and Sons. It's practically a world tour!
NEWS January 2007
Er, I've been slapping all my news straight into the blog for the past couple of months, on the assumption that nobody reads this page. But I may be wrong (must look at my traffic meter). If I am, I'll start sticking news on the news page again. Meantime, check the blog...
NEWS October 2007
On Friday, October 26th 2007, I'll be reading at the Baffle literary festival in Loughrea, Co. Galway, Ireland. Baffle (BOWES' ACADEMIC FELLOWSHIP AND FRATERNITY OF LITERARY ESOTERICS) was formed in Bowes-Kennedy pub in Loughrea, back in 1984. The pub is no more, but Baffle, like the universe, continues to expand.
The annual festival is an offshoot of Baffle's regular, year-round, pub-based poetry slam, which has generated five books of poetry.
I'm greatly looking forward to it, and will be wearing a clean shirt especially for the occasion.
NEWS September 2007
On Saturday, September 22nd, at 4.30pm, I'm reading at the Small Wonder festival with James Lasdun, last year's winner of the National Short Story Prize.
It's the only festival devoted entirely to short stories, and it runs from 19-23 September, at Charleston near Firle, East Sussex (in England, which is part of Europe...)
Their website with all the info is here.
Lots of interesting writers will be there: Monica Ali, Lucy Ellmann, Esther Freud, Etgar Keret, James Lasdun, Yiyun Li, Jon Snow, Colm Tóibín, Fay Weldon...
My hot tip for Small Wonder (apart from me and James Lasdun) is Lucy Ellmann and Etgar Keret, 7.30pm on Thursday. Should kick literary ass.
NEWS, July 7th 2007
JUDE ONLINE! FREE!
In defiance of the laws of common sense and economics, we've begun to publish Jude: Levels 2 & 3, free, online. Hurrah! Hurrah! So, after you've read Jude: Level 1, you can follow Jude's continuing adventures week by week, in a manner that is both Impressively Modern And Up-To-Date, and also satisfyingly cosy and Dickensian. The best of both the 19th and 21st centuries (leaving out that unfortunate aberration of a century, the 20th, about which the less said the better).
We'll be posting a decent-sized chunk (about 5,000 words) of Jude's adventures, every Thursday, till we get to the end (which will be around Christmas).
The new episodes will be posted in a fairly standard blog format, so you can either visit the site each week, or sign up for an RSS feed to deliver them to you (just like a blog). It won't be beautifully laid out like a book, but it will be awfully simple. And you can post your own comments, as it's unrolling, which Dickens didn't let you do...
Tell your friends, come one, come all.
Of course, if you have super-human self-control, you can grit your teeth, wait till next year, and buy the hardback of the entire epic saga. The hardback will be beautifully laid out, perfectly spaced, in a delightful typeface, on lovely paper. But, realistically, who has such super-human self control?
Click here for Jude Online...
News, June 3rd 2007
Jude: Level 1 came out yesterday, and I am very happy. I'll be on the radio tonight in Ireland, talking about the book: The Eleventh Hour, on RTE radio 1, at 11pm. It should be streamed live, and later archived on the RTE site.
News, June 12th 2007
We're bringing out a hardback of Jude: Level 1. Probably a limited edition, probably signed (by me). It should arrive in the shops around the same time as the paperback. More news on that soon. Everything's gone to press now, so it's starting to feel real.
It looks like I'll be doing a few readings over the summer, in Geneva, Galway, Dromineer, and several in the UK (including a damn good music festival) which will be confirmed very soon. More on those once they're definite...
Geneva is very definite. I will read there on Monday the 18th of July (2007). More info from the Geneva Literary Aid Society.
News, May 10th 2007
My long essay on comedy and the novel is in the current, May, issue of Prospect magazine, in All Good Newsagents. You can read it free here. (And you can read a lot of people arguing about it in the Guardian here.)
If This Isn't News I Don't Know What Is: April 23rd 2007
On Monday morning, April 23rd, in the BAFTA building, in London, to my intense, lasting, and ongoing astonishment, I won the UK's National Short Story Prize, for "The Orphan and the Mob". More on this in my journal, when I recover... What a day.
What a night.
MORE NEWS! APRIL 2007
My friend Iarla has sent me a critique of my last news item. He said, quite rightly, that he couldn't tell what week I meant by "next week" if I didn't put a date on it. I blush, I blush. All I can say in my defence is that I've never had any real news on the website before, so I didn't really know what to do with it. (Also, I'm not used to people actually visiting my news section.)
So, news, again:
On Tuesday the 17th of April 2007, at 3.30pm, the British Broadcasting Corporation will broadcast their cleaned-up version of Julian Gough's "The Orphan And The Mob" on Radio 4. The magnificent Conor Lovett will be reading it. The reading will be available online for the week after the broadcast, from the BBC Radio 4 website.
I should warn you that this is a BBC daytime edit of my story, so you will be shocked and appalled by the lack of bad language or biological detail. Personally I think it's not the same story without lines like "Ardcroney ballocks!", and lots of stuff concerning urethral sphincters under intense pressure. But at least 60% of my story is being broadcast (albeit with its ballocks cut off and urethral sphincter removed), unlike Hanif Kureishi's "Weddings and Beheadings", which the BBC have just pulled. His story is about a guy who's forced to film beheadings. The BBC had a journalist, Alan Johnston, kidnapped in Gaza last month, and a group has just claimed to have beheaded him, so one can understand the BBC's reluctance to broadcast Kureishi's story this week, whether or not you sympathise with that reluctance.
It's great that the BBC are trying to bring attention to the best modern writing by sponsoring this prize, but it does make you wonder how good a fit it is if daytime BBC can't broadcast half of it. I don't know how much they've had to cut from the other stories, but I get the feeling this is proving a more challenging year for them than last year (the first year of the National Short Story Prize) when the stories were by people like William Trevor and Rose Tremain.
NEWS! APRIL 2007
The shortlist for the National Short Story Prize has been announced by the BBC. My story, "The Orphan and the Mob", is on it. This is rather exciting, as it is, according to the Guardian, "the world's richest short story prize". The five shortlisted stories will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 over the next week, and then published in a small book by Grove/Atlantic.
I strongly recommend you listen to the radio version of "The Orphan and the Mob", as it has been recorded by Conor Lovett, the greatest Beckett actor of his generation, and my favourite stage actor. (And, for you uncultured oafs who spurn our glorious theatre, he was also in The Mainland episode of Father Ted.) It goes out on Radio 4, at 3.30pm, Tuesday 17th of April (2007). I'm sure it'll be streamed live, and archived later, so neither space nor time can stop you supping at the deep well of Conor Lovett's genius. (If you ever get the chance, go see him do Molloy, or even better, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. It's just him, directed by Judy Hegarty, and it's the best thing I've ever seen in a theatre.)
This is the shortlist:
Hanif Kureishi - Weddings and Beheadings
Jackie Kay - How To Get Away with Suicide
Julian Gough - The Orphan and The Mob.
David Almond- Slog's Dad
Jonathan Falla - The Morena
The judges are Mark Lawson, Monica Ali, AS Byatt, Di Speirs of the BBC and Alex Linklater of Prospect magazine.
First prize is fifteen grand. Second is three grand.
The winner will be announced on the 23rd of April.
NEWS! MARCH 2007
The publication date for Jude: Level 1 is going to be July 2nd (2007). The cover is coming along delightfully. It's being illustrated by Dan Mogford, the guy who designed the On-U Sound website, Morcheeba's The Antidote album, and the covers of lots of books for Granta and Verso and Profile. Including the splendid, and simple, cover for the hardback of Simon Gray's The Smoking Diaries, a book of which I'm very fond. (The night-thoughts of an aging, depressed, grumpy playwright, smoking and eating and complaining for 240 pages. A very enjoyable book, and one often bought, in error, by people who think it's a self-help guide to giving up smoking.)
Er, and none of the above look anything like the cover we're coming up with for Jude: Level 1, so none of those links will help you visualise it. I just thought you might like to see some of his other work...
Maybe I should go to bed now.
NEWS! FEBRUARY 2007.
My new novel, Jude, will be published in several stages, starting this year. The rather unusual form of publication is appropriate, as it's a rather unusual novel.
"Jude - Level 1" will be published, in paperback, in July.
"Jude - Level 2" and "Jude - Level 3" will be published, in episodes, free, online, starting in July (so that people who buy Level 1 can keep reading to the end of the novel, without a hideous wait, if they like). Then all of Jude (Levels 1, 2 and 3; about 500 pages) will be published, in a rather lovely hardback, as one volume, sometime next year. (The exact timing isn't yet decided.)
Yes, as in a video game, each level will be a little harder, or shall we say, demanding. But also more rewarding, I hope.
Level 1 is set entirely in Ireland. On his 18th birthday, Jude burns down his Tipperary Orphanage by mistake, and has to voyage out into the world. He heads for the Sodom of the West (ah, Galway, City of Sin), where he falls in love, and encounters many dangers and temptations... His quest for True Love (and for the Secret of his Origins) leads him across Ireland and back, from the fourth Aran Island to the inferno of Dublin City...
Level 2 takes place over 24 hours in London, and Level 3 brings Jude to Nevada, and his destiny.
"Jude" is an attempt to write the most serious comic novel of the young millennium, or the most comic serious novel. In structure and tone, it's probably more influenced by computer games and The Simpsons than by anything that's been up for the Booker lately. It is not realistic. It is not tasteful. You might like it. You might hate it. My old agent and old US publisher hated it. They are both splendid people, with exquisite literary taste; you have been warned. But I certainly gave it everything I had. And it's not like anything else.
Q: You spent seven years writing this book, and now you're giving away two-thirds of it?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: Because I'm intensely proud of Jude, and I want as many people as possible to get the chance to read it. Also, I trust people. I think a lot of people, if they like it online, they'll buy the full book when it comes out. We'll see...
NEWS! JANUARY 2007!
Er, there isn't much. News, that is. But what do you expect? I'm a writer; we sit in a room for years, physically there but mentally not there. It's rather like being dead, except we occasionally stand up and stretch.
Anyway, this is as close as it gets to NEWS! round here:
The novel I spent seven years writing will be published later this year, in a rather unusual format... More on that once we finalise the details.
My first publication of the year is extremely modest in scale, and indeed achievement. It's a sequence of ten short poems, called "The Book of Longing has disturbed my sleep". I've put it up on the website, under the link "Poetry".